Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint

Abstract

Chapter 4 investigates the hagiographic transfiguration of Thomas Becket’s laughter, and the recasting of his courtly wit into a saintly virtue. Known as a frivolous joker at Henry’s court, Thomas was posthumously celebrated as a type of “laughing saint” (sanctus ridens). He was described laughing while making prophecies and even while being murdered, and a unique series of comic miracles was attributed to him after his death. As this chapter argues, the making of Thomas as a “laughing saint” ultimately crystallized the intellectual, literary, and courtly ideas of laughter explored in the previous chapters. Legitimated by emerging ideas of transcendent laughter, this saintly image also depended on the popular currency of laughing prophets and miracles in late twelfth-century hagiographies, chronicles, and epic poems. Most importantly, the reshaping of Thomas’s laughter retroactively endowed the witty political culture of Henry II’s court with a new moral, quasi-theological power.